– by Wood Institute travel grantee Marieke Hendriksen*
As a historian of art and science, I am particularly interested in the exchange of knowledge and skills between visual artists and medical men in writing and practice in the 18th century. Last year, the F.C. Wood Institute at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia awarded me a travel grant to study the collaboration between artists and anatomists in Philadelphia in the first decades of the College (est. 1787). It has long been known that anatomists and visual artists worked closely together in the production of anatomical atlases and models in early modern Europe, and sometimes were even united in the same person. An extensive corpus of literature about anatomical preparations and illustrations exists, yet little attention has been paid thus far to the development, understanding and transmission of various other techniques for depicting the body among artists and anatomists. My research fills that gap by focusing on the development and exchange of techniques like plaster casting, wax, wood, and papier-mâché modelling among artists and anatomists. The practices and resources in the early decades of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia form a fascinating case for this research project as they developed in conjunction with similar practices in Europe, yet were in a sense also geographically isolated.
One of the most important collections of models and preparations created in Philadelphia around 1800 was that of Caspar Wistar (1761-1818), professor of chemistry and the institutes of medicine at the College of Philadelphia and one of the first elected Fellows of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Wistar was a skilled maker of anatomical preparations and models, which he created by injecting organs with wax. It appears that in the early decades of his career, he predominantly created anatomical preparations and models himself. The catalogue of his collections in 1832 listed at least 127 anatomical preparations of human tissue. Among these were organs injected with mercury or coloured wax, dried and wet preparations, bones and skeletal preparations, and corrosion casts. Besides this, there were at least twenty-five preparations of animal tissue, mostly skeletal, which Wistar used for the study of comparative anatomy, a relatively new field at the time.[1] Finally, there was a collection of lymphatic preparations that Wistar had bought from the famous Italian anatomist Mascagni in 1812. The collection contained at least seventeen models made from various materials, such as wax, paper, clay, wood, and plaster. While no maker is specified for the models in paper, wax, and plaster, the ten wooden models and one clay model are described as ‘by William Rush’.
Philadelphia-born William Rush (1756-1833) had started his career as a carver of ship figureheads, learning the trade from his father and the famous stonecutter and carver Edward Cutbush, Sr. (1745–1790). Rush was one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which was established in 1805, and from the early nineteenth century onwards, he created a number of sculptures for public places in Philadelphia. The models made by Rush that were found in Wistar’s collection are unique. Wistar ordered them between 1802 and 1818, when the number of students attending his classes greatly increased, and he decided he needed something more dramatic than his usual anatomical preparations as a teaching aid: enlarged models of human anatomy, which would be visible even at the back rows. Probably realizing that this surpassed his own modelling skills, he turned to Rush, who made at least twenty models for him.
Rush and Wistar had collaborated before: Rush had carved from wood missing bones for a mastodon exhumed by the Philadelphia collector and artist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and his son Rembrandt in New York State in 1801. The mastodon was then reconstructed under the guidance of none other than Caspar Wistar, who was a board member of Peale’s museum.[2] Having made anatomical preparations and some models himself, when the time came, Wistar must have realized he needed someone with Rush’s exceptional skill to make his models.
There is no concrete evidence that Wistar taught Rush anatomy or that Rush taught Wistar practical skills for model making, but it is clear that they were very much aware of each other’s knowledge and skills, and that makes it rather unlikely that they never learned anything from each other. Rush successfully transmitted his technique from one discipline to another, from artistic sculpting to anatomical model making. Wistar experimented with other artists making models and had them collaborate with Rush for him too:
“Doctor Wistar being desirous to have large models of the human throat and wind pipe, that the pupils at a distance could see them, applied to [Charles Willson] Peale to make them, which he did some in papier maché and with wax, of an immensely large size; and his son Raphaelle modelled the brains also in a large size, to complete that part of the head Mr. Wm. Rush carved in wood the outer part; the whole a curious and interesting work, very important to illustrate the anatomical structure of the human head.”[3]
Raphaelle Peale (1774 -1825) tried his hand in more than one medium. Apart from making the papier maché brain for Wistar’s model, Peale worked as a portrait painter, miniaturist, a painter of still lives and silhouette maker, and also as a taxidermist for his father’s museum.[4] These multi-talented craftsmen-artists were aware of the value of their skills, as appears from a letter that Rush wrote to President James Madison in 1815: “I have been above sixty years in my business, and probably have exhibited some humble talents that would entitle me to some consideration more than a mere labourer.”[5] The medical community in Philadelphia also highly valued the anatomical models they created. When Wistar died in 1818, the last model Rush had been working on – of the wrist – remained unfinished. Wistar’s colleague Philip Syng Physick (1768-1837) paid for the model to be finished so that it could be added to the newly established anatomical museum at the University of Pennsylvania, to which Wistar had bequeathed his collection.[6] There, the models continued to be used in teaching until the early twentieth century.
The creative history of the Wistar models shows that even though there is no concrete evidence that these artists and anatomists taught each other practical skills, the making of anatomical models in Philadelphia around 1800 was a collaborative effort, in which the knowledge and skills of both parties were indispensable. This is strikingly different from the situation in some other places. For example, in Edinburgh around 1800, no makers of anatomical models were identified by name, while in Philadelphia we see that the roles of the anatomist and artist-craftsman in the making of models are relatively well documented. My hypothesis is that the Quaker appreciation of craftsmanship may have had something to do with this – after all, these Philadelphians were Quakers, and the first popular handbook for the making of anatomical models and preparations was published in 1790 by Thomas Pole, a Philadelphian Quaker and medical doctor who settled in England.[7] This is a line of inquiry that I will pursue further in the future.
Bibliography:
[1] Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology. Catalogue of the Anatomical Museum of the University of Pennsylvania: With a Report to the Museum Committee of the Trustees : November, 1832. Philadelphia: Lydia R. Bailey, 1832, p. 33-50.
[2] Boyle, Richard J., ed. William Rush, American Sculptor. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1982, p. 16.
[3] “The autobiography of Charles Willson Peale,” transcript by Horace Wells Sellers, Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale, series II-C, card 19, p. 373, cited in Boyle, Richard J., ed. William Rush, American Sculptor. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1982, p. 19.
[4] Phoebe Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story”, Art in America, (November 1988), 154–171, 195–200.
[5] William Rush, ‘Circular letter with description of [his] statue of Washington’. Peabody Essex Museum Philips Library, Timothy Pickering, Manuscripts. Vol. 1, p. 11, Call number E312.45 .R874 1815.
[6] Marceau, Henri. William Rush 1756-1833. The First Native American Sculptor. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Museum of Art, 1937, p. 25.
[7] Pole, Thomas. The Anatomical Instructor ; or an Illustration of the Modern and Most Approved Methods of Preparing and Preserving the Different Parts of the Human Body and of Quadrupeds by Injection, Corrosion, Maceration, Distention, Articulation, Modelling, &C. London: Couchman & Fry, 1790. Lapsansky-Werner, Emma J., and Anne A. Verplanck. Quaker Aesthetics : Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
*Marieke Hendriksen is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University within the ERC-funded project Artechne. She received an F.C. Wood Institute Travel Grant from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 2017.